Another Blogging Milestone
The other day I made my one-thousandth post to this blog. I didn’t know this milestone had passed until I logged in today and the helpful counter in the administrative area told me so. What a milestone to achieve with my post about Jupiter and its latest impact! I’m grateful to all my readers who keep coming back. You’re why I write this stuff about the universe!
So, here in post 1,002, what should I write about? Stargazing is always a good topic. There’s nothing like a stroll under the night-time sky to inspire one’s thoughts toward cosmic ideas. We’ve been going out every night to watch the sunset and see who can spot Venus first. It’s there, if you know where to look, and once the skies start to get kinda, sorta dark, the planet is blazing out like a beacon. The good thing about Venus is that you only need clear skies to see it because it’s bright in city skies as well as in the dark countryside. So, I encourage you to check out Venus in the evening.
Venus-gazing reminds me of a phone call we got at the planetarium back when I was a lecturer there. It was from a person who was nearly terrified that the aliens were landing and that we (astronomers) hadn’t told anybody. I asked the caller what made them think the Earth was being invaded and they described how they had been watching this bright light in the western skies each night for a week and how that light got closer to the mountains each night and then disappear. They were sure that the alien ship was landing in the mountains each night. The caller was most upset when I explained that they were seeing the planet Venus set behind the mountains, just as the Sun did each night. Well, I don’t know if they were upset at finding out what they were seeing or embarrassed at not having made the connection between the Sun setting behind the mountains and the planets (and stars) doing the same.
This was years before the Comet Hale-Bopp Heaven’s Gate cult madness and not long before I went back to school and spent some of my grad school years studying comets. We were used to getting phone calls from the public about mysterious lights in the sky, but the imaginative stories some people told never failed to amaze (and sometimes sadden) me.
It seems that when it comes to the sky and understanding what’s in it, somehow some people suspend their common sense, their sense of disbelief, and will swallow anything. I don’t know why that is. I just know that it happens. Which is too bad, because actually studying and understanding how things in the sky work is a very satisfying and fascinating journey. It’s not different from understanding (in general terms) how a car engine works or how a plane works. If you want to know, you probably ask somebody who works on cars, or you find a book on how planes fly. You seek to understand the physical reasons why the car runs and the plane flies.
We wouldn’t tell somebody that a car works by magic or that a plane goes up into the air because of magical spirits that lift it up, would we? So, why, upon seeing a bright light in the sky, did a person jump to an unsupported conclusion that it was a shipload of LGMs on some kind of tour of the planets? Why did the Heaven’s Gaters decide that a known comet was a mothership? They didn’t use common sense — well, let me say that the person who called me at the planetarium at least wanted to know what the light really was. The Heaven’s Gaters didn’t want to know (0r couldn’t let themselves find out) what Comet Hale-Bopp really was.
Certainly stargazing lights some amazing thought-fires in your brain. It certainly does in mine, and I’ve been lucky to be able to share those thoughts with readers since early 2002. It’s been a grand time doing a grand of postings!
